Early warning systems use school record data--such as attendance rate, behavior records, and course performance--to identify students at risk of dropping out. These are useful predictors of graduation-related outcomes, in large part because they indicate a student's level of engagement with school. However, these data do not indicate how invested…

The Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) is a self-report measure of cognitive and affective engagement with school. Prior SEI validation studies have focused primarily on construct validity through analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis, and measurement invariance. Results are presented here from a two-pronged study of the criterion…

The issue of high school dropout has long concerned policy makers, educational professionals, and the general public. In the gifted literature, this concern is no less pressing. Student engagement is becoming an increasingly discussed construct for conceptualizing the dropout phenomenon and designing appropriate interventions to prevent this…

Early school withdrawal, commonly referred to as dropout, is associated with a plethora of negative outcomes for students, schools, and society. Student engagement, however, presents as a promising theoretical model and cornerstone of school completion interventions. The purpose of the present study was to validate the Student Engagement…

This article argues that reading interventions are a key dropout prevention strategy. A review of the literature connects reading skills and interventions with events such as grade retention, placement in special education, and high school dropout. In general, data indicate that intensive early interventions positively affect students' reading…